Wonder Boys (20 page)

Along with the old springhouse, only the barn and the boathouse on the pond were standing in the late fifties when Irving Warshaw bought the land. He’d had to build the main house from scratch, on weekends and holidays and summer vacations during the Kennedy and Johnson years. On the foundation of an earlier structure, with materials salvaged from abandoned farmsteads all over Mercer County, he’d raised up a modest two-story saltbox of weathered gray shingles, with a fieldstone chimney, an eclectic assortment of old leaded windows in the living and dining rooms, and a pair of dormers in the attic story that were set too close together and lent the house a cross-eyed expression. The floors were crooked, none of the doors hung true, and on windy days the draft of the fireplace had been known abruptly to reverse itself, filling the entire house with roiling clouds of black smoke; but Irv had done the job almost entirely himself, with some help from his late brother, Harry, and from a local named Everett Tripp, an alcoholic wires-and-pipes man who’d tried to feel Emily up when she was eight years old, and who may well have been a distant cousin of the narrator. When his sons were old enough to give him a hand, Irv set about restoring the wreck of the barn, a great gray ark staved in and keeled over in the tall grass a hundred yards from the house, which an expert from Penn State had dated to before the Civil War.

“I’ve never visited a real farm,” said James, as we turned right, just beyond the Odd Fellows’ Hall, into an alley of elm trees, huge and still leafless, that ran from Kinship Road up to the house, planted at reasonable intervals in the last century by careful Utopian hands. These trees, according to some freak of the breezes, had for many years escaped the Dutch elm disease, but now there were many gaps in the double colonnade. Last summer I’d helped Irv bring down two blighted trees, and it looked as though a few more had failed to bud this spring. In a few years the whole grand structure would be gone.

“Don’t hold your breath,” I said. “This is a farm like I’m an English teacher.”

“Look,” said James, in a contradictory tone, pointing to the pair of milk cows who were, along with an irritable yellow gelding, the sole current occupants of the restored barn. “Cows.”

“Don’t they have those around Carvel?” I said, touched by the childish ardor with which he returned the charitable gaze of the cows. “I thought it was a pretty small town.”

“Not all small towns have cows.”

“True,” I said. “The yellowish one’s a horse.”

James said, “Yeah? I’ve heard of those.”

“They’re good eating,” I said.

I parked the car behind Emily’s Bug, in the intermittent shade of a horse chestnut tree, and we climbed out. The tree was some eighty years old and in leaf now; in another few weeks it would be crawling with spidery white blossoms. In the front garden of the McClelland Hotel there’d been just such a high, spreading, oval-shaped horse chestnut. As I stepped out of the car my cheeks were tingling, my ears were ringing with wind, and my hair felt permanently blown backward, like the streaming chrome hair of a hood ornament. My ankle had stiffened in the course of the drive and I found that I could barely stand on it.

“Check that out,” I said, pointing to the lawn that lay beyond the handsome old tree, where there stood a ragged stonehenge of whitewashed rocks. Beneath each of these rocks, I explained to James, lay the skeleton of a Warshaw family pet, buried, in the Egyptian manner, along with its rhinestone collars and plastic T-bones or catnip-filled mice. Most of the names painted onto the rocks had long since washed away, but you could still make out the inscriptions on the final resting places of the bones of Shlumper and Farfel and Earmuffs the cat. Off to one side stood a large, jagged molar stone, all by itself. This one marked the grave of a schnauzer bought to console Emily after the drowning of her older brother, the summer that she turned nine. She’d insisted on naming the puppy after him, and when it died, Sam’s name went onto the whitewashed stone, where it remained, faded but still legible. The bones of Sam the boy lay under a bronze tablet in Beth Shalom cemetery, in the North Hills, by the corner of Tristan Avenue and Isolde Street.

“I had fish when I was a kid,” said James. “We used to just flush them.”

“Oh shit,” I said, “Emily’s flowers.” I leaned over into the back of the car and discovered that in the course of our journey the wind had reached in and plucked bare every last rose. We must have left a trail of petals along the highway from Pittsburgh to Kinship. It was just a six-dollar arrangement padded with baby’s breath and bear grass but nonetheless at the loss of it I felt disconcerted and somehow disarmed.

“Oops,” said James, looking at me with an expression halfway between pity and disapproval, the way you look at a drunken man who stands up to find that he has been sitting for an hour on his hat.

“This way,” I said carelessly. I tossed the ruined bouquet onto Sam’s grave. “And don’t forget your knapsack.”

I limped around to the laundry-room door and showed James into the house. Nobody ever went in by the front door. We passed through the warm sugary smell of the clothes dryer and came into the steam-filled kitchen, and I caught a look of disappointment on James’s face. I supposed he’d been expecting a country kitchen, pine and burnished copper, lace in the window, but Irene had remodeled at the peak or nadir of the 1970s, and her kitchen was a veritable fiesta of goldenrod and avocado and burnt orange accents, her cabinets clad in walnut Formica, adorned with elaborate gilt handles. The air smelled of scorched butter and caramelized onion and a gunpowder tang that I recognized as the smoke from Emily’s Canadian cigarettes. Emily herself was nowhere to be seen. Irene and Marie, Philly’s wife, stood at the stove, with their backs to us, launching raw matzoh balls into an iron pot. As we came into the kitchen they both turned around.

“Surprise,” I said, thinking I would take it very hard if Irene Warshaw was sorry to see my face.

“Hello, hello!” said Irene, holding out her arms to me, wagging her head disbelievingly from side to side. Irene wasn’t tall but she had a good fifty pounds on me, and when she shook one of her body parts all the rest of them tended to join in. In the country—and since Irv’s retirement, five years earlier, she was nearly always in the country—she modeled her pursuits and her manner of dress as nearly as possible on those of Monet at Giverny, and she had on a broad straw hat and a knee-length blue chambray smock with billowing sleeves. She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.

I kissed her soft cheek. I closed my eyes and she pressed my forehead firmly against her lips. She had a bitter, nutritious smell compounded of cooking oil, castile soap, and the five hundred milligrams of B complex vitamins she swallowed every day.

“Hello, sweetie,” she said. “I’m so glad to see you.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said.

“I knew you’d come.”

“How’d you know that?”

She shrugged. “I knew.”

“Irene, this is James Leer, he’s a student of mine. A very talented writer.”

“How
wonderful
,” said Irene, extending her arm past me to take hold of James’s pale hand. In the early forties, at Carnegie Tech, Irene had majored in English literature and, in particular considering her long years of exposure to me, esteemed writers far too highly. Her literary taste was more exclusive and refined than Sara’s, and she read with greater deliberateness, rereading and underlining choice phrases and keeping track of the characters with lists and genealogies on the flyleaf. There was a stern photograph of a besweatered, smoke-wreathed Lawrence Durrell, her absolute favorite, hanging on the wall above her secretary desk, and in her wallet she carried around a scrap of crumpled program, rescued from a trash can, on which, during the course of an awards ceremony at the Poetry Forum, a bored John Updike had sketched a carious incisor tooth that was killing him that night. I’d been trading for many years now on the goodwill that my occupation earned for me in Irene’s regard. “How
are
you, James? A
writer
? And you’ve come to make the Seder with us?”

“I—I guess so,” said James, drawing himself down deep into his filthy black coat. There was a ring of powdered sugar imprinted on one flap. “I mean, yes, if it’s all right with you. I’ve never, uh, is it—made one? before.”

“Of course! Of course!” She crinkled up her face and smiled her most grandmotherly smile, but I saw that her blue eyes, examining James, were cold as only a grandmother’s can be. James Leer had the kind of pallid and formless good looks that to a woman of Irene’s age might bespeak illness, onanism, defective upbringing, or mental infirmity. I supposed it was not impossible that having grown up during a decade which preferred the colors avocado, burnt orange, and goldenrod might well have injured his brain.

“And this is Marie. My daughter-in-law.”

“What’s up, James?” said Marie. Born—I always got a kick out of this—during an emergency refueling stop on Wake Island, freckled, a bit wide in the hips, Marie had, unlike me, converted on marrying into the Warshaw family, and except for her childlessness she had transformed herself into a peerless Jewish daughter-in-law. Marie was in fact the best Jew in the family, far more observant than her husband or his parents. She pinned a doily to her hair on Friday nights to light the candles, and baked three-cornered cookies when it was annually appropriate, and knew all the words, in Hebrew, to the national anthem of Israel. Like many army brats she had an open and imperturbable character, which served her well in her husband’s family, no two of whose members shared traits of character, or DNA, or otherwise bore any more resemblance to each other than the seventeen states and countries in which Marie had grown up.

“You look tired,” she said, patting my cheek.

“I’ve been working hard,” I said. I wondered how much she knew about Emily and me.

“How’s the book?”

“Great, great. Just about done.” I’d been telling her the same thing since the days of her engagement to Philly. “Everything all ready here? Smells good.”

“More or less” said Irene. “I’ve had so much to do. Marie’s been
such
a big help. Emily, too.” She looked at me. “I’m glad she decided to show up a day early.”

“Uh huh,” I said. I thought she might be fucking with me—as a pothead, I spent a lot of time thinking that people might be fucking with me—but there was not a hint of sarcasm in her face or tone. That didn’t necessarily mean, however, that she wasn’t fucking with me. Before her own retirement Irene had for thirty years run a private agency that supplied the entire Ohio Valley with Korean babies, and she was master of a certain kind of administrative deadpan I’d never learned to read.

“I shouldn’t complain about having too much to do, though,” she said, with a dramatic sigh. With one automatic hand she reached into a pocket of her smock, brought out a chick wrapped in flashing yellow foil, peeled it, and neatly severed its chocolate head. “It’s better than being bored out of my skull.”

“Aw, Irene,” I said.

“I never should have let him talk me into leaving the house on Inverness,” she said, chewing.

“I know,” I said. During all her years there Irene had felt little affection for the house on Inverness Avenue, a cramped brick two-story, much smaller than all its neighbors, and she had been glad at last to see it sold. Since the move out to Kinship, though, the place had assumed in her mind the fabulous proportions of some lost Jerusalem or Tara. “It’s been hard for you.”

“It’s been very hard,” Marie told James.

“And I’m repeating myself, aren’t I?” Irene winked at James and sadly shook her head. Having devoted her life to the invention and licensing and construction of a thousand families all over western Pennsylvania and Ohio—the macromanagement of families, so to speaks—it was her melancholy fate to have ended up living far from her remaining children, in a ghost town, with a husband who spent most of his time locked up in a shed, building Wheatstone bridges and Kremlins for barn swallows.

“So where is everybody else?” I said, looking around. Beside the toaster, on a china saucer, sat the little memorial candle Irv had mentioned, in its jelly glass, its tiny fire pale and motionless. Its label, with blue mock-Hebrew characters, had been pasted on at a crooked angle, and it was priced with a fluorescent orange grocery-store sticker at 79¢.

“Deborah’s lying out on the dock” said Irene, following my gaze. “She’s been
no
help at all, of course. And I guess Philly—is he still down in the basement?”

“Of course. Playing with Grossman,” said Marie. “Mr. Grossman got out again last night.”

“Mr. Grossman?” said James. “Who’s that?”

“I’m sure you’ll find out,” said Irene, rolling her eyes. She looked at me. “And you
know
where Irv is.”

“In the springhouse.”

“Where else?”

“Maybe I’ll just take James out to meet him, then.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Irene. She brushed a damp strand of hair from her eyes with the back of one arm, then made a helpless gesture that encompassed all the saucepans, crockery bowls, and empty halves of eggshells scattered across every available surface of the kitchen. “I’m afraid we’re still
hours
away.”

“Oh, now,” said Marie. “It’s not that bad.”

“Oh, say,” said Irene. She looked at James. “How old are you?”

“Huh?” said James, startled. He’d been looking over at the modest, all-but-invisible light the Warshaws had lit to commemorate the anniversary of Sam Warshaw’s death. “I’m twenty. Almost twenty-one.”

“Well, then you’re the youngest.” Irene tried to keep her voice sounding bright and bureaucratic, but it got a little hollow here, and you could see she was wondering how it had come to pass that in her family a twenty-year-old stranger in an ill-smelling trench coat could pass for the child of the house. Out of kindness neither she nor I looked at Marie, on whom all hopes for a grandchild, I realized, had now come ponderously to settle. “You’ll have to say the Four Questions at the Seder.”